― Willie Nelson
When the mouse laughs at the cat, there's a hole nearby.
― Nigerian Proverb
I can always tell when the mother in law's coming to stay; the mice throw themselves on the traps.
— Les Dawson
A few years ago, we had a mouse problem. They’d gotten into the bank of cupboards along the outer wall of the kitchen where the sink is. Mostly in the cupboards, upper and lower, between the wall and the stove. Between the cat, Dante, and the traps, we pretty much took care of the problem: Dante – 4, traps – 2.
We have since renovated the kitchen, and the cupboards and floors were all replaced. The kitchen was pretty much mouse-proof. So we thought.
A few weeks ago we discovered mouse dirt in the drawer in the bottom of the stove where we kept our pots. I say “kept” because as soon as I saw it I removed the pots, washed them thoroughly, and put them in a plastic bin with a snap down lid. The hubby left a paper plate full of mouse bait in their place.
We waited patiently for the mouse bait to do it’s thing, but there were a couple of times I thought I heard a rustling in a dark corner of the dining room where the bookcases almost butt up to the deck door. There’s a plant stand there as well, with a stack of plastic bins in between.
The hubby thought I was hearing things, until the morning I got up and found this waiting for me on the floor near the coffee station in the kitchen:
Nineteen years old and Dante’s still got the right stuff.
Then a couple of days later I went into the lower corner cupboard in the kitchen (where I keep my baking stuff) to get some flour to make bread – you guessed it, I found mouse dirt on the lower lazy susan. The thing is, I was in that cupboard a couple of days prior and didn’t see anything amiss.
I had one plastic bin with a snap down lid that held things like icing sugar, chocolate chips, coconut, etc. and it, of course, was untouched. And I kept the whole wheat flour, sugar, and oatmeal in air tight containers so I felt confident it wasn’t touched either. Everything else got checked carefully; most of it got thrown out just on principle.
Strangely, the mice didn’t appear to have made it to the upper lazy susan, but then other than spices, that’s where I keep my baking utensils. I have since purchased more tall, narrow plastic bins with snap down lids to hold my baking supplies.
Meanwhile, I’m still hearing a rustling in the evenings in that dark corner of the dining room. And then one night I spy a strange shadow out of the corner of my eye. It seemed to be on the vertical blind near the bookcase. My eyes not being the best, I stared at the blind and sure enough, it was a mouse climbing up and down.
So . . . the hubby dug out the single mouse trap we still owned, and baited it with crunchy peanut butter, placing it behind the stack of bins in the space between the bins and the glass spacer of the deck door.
I’m sure it wasn’t even a hour before we heard a loud snap from that corner. Sure enough, there was a mouse corpse. The hubby took the trap outside and disposed of the corpse, then reset it and put it back behind the bins. Another snap, and another dead mouse.
To date, we have gotten rid of nine mice, counting the one Dante got. The trap hasn’t seen any action for the last couple of days, so we’re cautiously optimistic that we’ve dealt with them all.
But that’s not quite the end of my story. Unbeknownst to me, when the hubby got rid of the mouse corpses, all he did was toss them over the rail of the deck. But here’s the thing. They kept disappearing. So who was cleaning up our mouse pile for us?
A couple of days after the first mouse went over the rail, a young raccoon paid a visit to our deck and was hanging around as though looking for something. Mystery solved.
I guess they don’t call them trash pandas for nothing.
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